Excavation and land clearing in Gorham, Maine.
Gorham's Rural district requires 60,000 square feet per house lot and 200 feet of road frontage, and much of the town outside the Village is still woods, pasture and old farmland. Building on that land means clearing, stumping and digging before a foundation can be poured, and the town's code has clear rules on how that ground is opened and how the material moves.
We run our own equipment for land clearing, foundation and site excavation, drainage trenching and retention pond work, so one crew carries a Gorham project from wooded lot to rough grade.
Earth that stays, and earth that leaves
Gorham's code regulates excavation and the removal of topsoil, sand, gravel and rock. Digging that goes with construction under an issued building permit is exempt, as is moving material from one part of a lot to another. Removing less than 200 cubic yards in a year from a tract that disturbs no more than an acre is exempt too, but that exemption does not cover topsoil: loam cannot simply be sold off a site outside an approved construction project.
In practice, that means stumps and brush leave the property while loam is stockpiled for final grading. The erosion standards in the same chapter ask that as little subsoil as possible be exposed at any one time, that sediment be trapped before it leaves the site, and that permanent cover go in quickly.
Special districts, streams and blasting
Two local features change the work. In the Black Brook and Brackett Road Special Protection District, the code bars new wells and bars blasting except by or with the approval of the Portland Water District to extend a water main. In the shoreland zone, clearing for any purpose, including driveways, lawns and septic areas, is limited to 25 percent of the lot within the zone or 10,000 square feet, whichever is greater.
Clearing in the Resource Protection subdistrict is limited to what its allowed uses need. On a rural Gorham parcel with a brook at the back, that decides where the house, well and leach field can go before the first tree is cut. Timber harvested along the way follows the state's harvesting rules; the 2016 plan counted about 40 harvest notifications in Gorham in 2010 alone. Drainage trenching and retention pond work on commercial sites along Route 25 follow the same erosion standards, with sediment controls in place before the first cut.
Land Clearing · Site Work · Trenching
How we handle excavation & land clearing
We run our own excavation equipment, which means one crew takes your project from raw ground to ready: land clearing, foundation and site excavation, drainage trenching, and retention pond mowing and trenching for commercial properties.
See the full excavation & land clearing service page or everything we do in Gorham, Maine.
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Free Estimates
Excavation & Land Clearing in Gorham? Let's talk.
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Mon–Sat 7:00am – 5:00pm · Based in Cumberland, Maine